


Coldfire

by TwinRivers



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Alternate Norse Religion & Lore, Alternate Universe - Vikings, Character Death, F/M, Major Character Injury, POV Draco Malfoy, POV Hermione Granger, References to Norse Religion & Lore, Seer Draco Malfoy, Spooky
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-01
Updated: 2019-03-01
Packaged: 2019-11-07 09:17:49
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 12,241
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17957819
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TwinRivers/pseuds/TwinRivers
Summary: Hermione needs to get across the shores. She's had visions of the Iceman, and knows that he is destined to die there unless she follows him there and keeps him from being murdered.DRAMIONE VIKING AU





	Coldfire

**Author's Note:**

> **Prompt:**
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> Viking AU: A crew is setting out on a journey to undiscovered lands. He’s already been selected, but she needs a spot to prove her worth as a warrior and sailor.
> 
> BIG NOTE: This WILL be turned into a multi-chapter fic. It may be a bit complicated at times. Pls bear with me. I loved this writing experience so hecking much.  
> Thank you so much for this fest, it really pushed me to my limits and I've loved every second.
> 
>  
> 
> Thank you to Frecklesandbroomsticks for the Beta! I needed it!  
> My favourite mistake that she caught: "He was wary of spooky her"  
> HE WAS WARY OF SPOOKY HER.  
> I love it.  
> And I love her.  
> She is my Fanfic Soulmate. Truly. The BETAst. Best. The Best. Also I updated her on a new direction like every other day and she kept me sane.  
> So... props to her.

Hermione bolted upright, awoken suddenly in the dark. She’d only seen a sliver of the dream, it was really only a fraction of one. It was only a hair of a moment that she flew outside of her body, clinging to the inside of a bird as it flew over a land too foreign for Hermione to make out. There was rolling fog, and Hermione could hardly make out the men underneath it as they thrashed and scrambled with their swords and screams. The bird she was in circled when it caught sight of a man covered in ice.

Hermione shivered. She’d seen this man before.

The bird flapped its wings above him and it was all happening in what was only a blink in the real world but Hermione could see him being approached and she couldn’t make out the movement but she saw blood spurt from his lips onto white skin, iced flesh, and he dropped.

And she could feel the bird start to lower itself and lower still and then they were on land. The bird crouched to take a wary hop closer to the man who, at this point, Hermione deduced was nearly dead. He turned his head to lock eyes with the bird and she could see herself in his eyes, inside the raven, and he stared with wide eyes and stretched his fingers toward the bird.

“Please,” he spoke in a gravelled voice, blood dripping from his lips.

And the bird ruffled its feathers, shook them out and felt the first drops of rain fall on heavy feathers before hopping again to approach him and in a screeching instant, the raven lunged and Hermione bolted upright, awoken suddenly in the dark. She’d only seen a sliver of the dream, it was really only a fraction of one—only a hair of a moment that she flew outside of her body. But it was enough.

And Hermione woke with something cold on her lips despite lying safely in her tent, protected from the winter outside. She lifted a cautious hand to touch her now frozen mouth and was met with ice—or perhaps it was snow—but it was melting and starting to dribble down her chin.

The wind outside hissed and Hermione shivered in the numbing cold.

It was the middle of winter, and Hermione held her furs close to her as she cursed Odin for the blasted weather that might very well freeze her to death before she got to do anything about the dreams.

About the visions.

About the Iceman who would die across the shores.

About the Iceman she would save.

 

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ 

Hermione sat by the edge of the river, just at the lips of her tent, and took a deep breath before taking her knife and sawing into her thickly braided hair. It didn’t cut straight through like she’d hoped, rather it managed to slice jagged clumps. She opened her fist to let the separated bits fall onto the earth around her and tried again.

She’d only gotten through one side when she felt someone behind her, watching her. The hairs on the back of her neck prickled and she hurried to cover the shoulder length bits of hair by pulling up her hood.

“Calm down, it’s only me.” Pansy smirked. Hermione took a deep breath at her voice and gave her a small smile, watching as the girl shivered and pulled her shawl closer to her as she took a few steps closer to the stream.

It was cold out; cold enough for the water to turn flesh a snowy white and then a rosy red. Cold enough that a small girl died in it just a few days earlier. She probably thought that the ice was still sturdy beneath her feet, but winter was dying down and the ice was weak, and she fell through and got stuck beneath the thicker bits. And she died.

The Chieftain found her a few hours later, face down at the bottom of the rushing water and cold to the touch—just as Hermione had seen her in her dreams.

White. Stiff. Bruised.

The children from around the village grow up being told to be wary of the fast waters, though small groups did occasionally make their way up in an act of heroism, hoping to prove their bravery. But this girl was far too young to be going up by herself and Hermione watched her bide her time until nobody would notice her absence. She’d watched with narrow eyes as the child slipped past the farthest tents and ran into the forest and Hermione knew it wouldn’t be long until the girl’s body would be found.

But where Hermione sat now was more like a stream. It ran off from the river a half hour walk up the current and forked into the streams that separated the “rich” from the “rest.” Hermione’s tent—firmly in the “rest”—was small and comfortable. It sat only a few feet from the stream and she was lucky, because where she lived on it was shallow enough to walk across without getting her thighs wet, and slow enough to set sticks down in it like little boats and watch them bob down and out of sight as they float down to the lake, and then to the sea.

She liked to watch things float down. She’d had dreams of seeing the dead girl’s scarf trickling down.

Hermione glanced at the water in front of her, at the clumps of wiry braid beside her, and tossed it into the stream. The hair separated and spread out, carried away and drifting down to where three girls downstream were washing themselves. They squealed when long strands of hair coated their legs and jumped from the current to shake themselves while the oldest of them ran to fetch their clothing to dry themselves with.

Hermione smiled cheekily as the three of them huffed at the water and splashed at it angrily. She watched them out of the corner of her eye and satisfaction curled around her when the girls gave up with washing themselves entirely and hurried away.

“You’re going to be late for supper,” Pansy said in a hushed voice from behind her.

Hermione rolled her eyes.

“I’m waiting for something. Would you like to sit with me for a while?”

Pansy bristled and sat down beside her. “You’re going to get yourself in trouble, ‘Mione.”

“I never get in trouble. Besides, I need this.”

“And what would you need a dead girl’s scarf for? It’s bad enough that you knew she’d die if she went and still let her go.”

“I need it for something,” Hermione said calmly. She felt the wind brush her forearms and tucked her chin into her tunic.

“That’s your excuse for letting a kid drown?”

“I really need it?”

“You’re lucky I don’t tell anyone about this or they’ll know you’re a vǫlur.” She smirked a bit when Hermione didn’t flinch or respond. “If they know you’ve been hiding this from them all this time… You better be praying to Loki, he’s probably the only one who’ll bother listening to you.”

Hermione pursed her lips. “They can’t know, Pansy.”

“Why not?” Pansy countered. “Didn’t you say you’re going to be leaving with this year’s raiders, anyway? Isn’t that why you’re cutting your hair off?”

Hermione shrugged. “That’s precisely why they can’t know.”

“When will it be?” Pansy asked softly, watching Hermione carefully as she leaned closer to the river. Pansy looked up and noticed a small fleck of brown bobbing downstream toward them.

Hermione casually hiked her skirts up around her waist and gently dipped herself into the water and stretched her arms, leaning down a bit to grab the bobbing fleck as it nudged her ankles.

“When I meet the Iceman. If they know I’ve got the sight they’ll never let me leave with the raiders. They’ll ship me off to the King and you know what the King does to seers.”

Pansy shook her head. “I don’t understand you. Any girl here would die to marry the King. Sure, he’s old. But he’s rich, and I hear he likes to keep vǫlur virgins to keep them pure enough for Freyja. Besides, who is this Iceman? You never tell me anything about him except that he’s made of ice, and that doesn’t make a lick of sense.”

“I met him in a dream, that’s all you really need to know,” Hermione whispered as she twisted the water out of the waterlogged fabric and tossed it next to Pansy.

“You had one dream nine years ago. That’s not exactly reliable memory material, Hermione. If Freyja ever meant for you to meet him, wouldn’t he have come already?”

“She sent it to me nine years ago so I’d have time to prepare,” Hermione murmured, disgruntled. She wondered if she should tell Pansy about the dream from just a few months ago… 

“Yet you refuse to wash even though he’s probably going to be coming in with the travelers for the journeys to the West.”

“I need to blend in with them. Which reminds me,” Hermione said, turning her back to Pansy and holding out the knife. “Could you help me? I can’t seem to get a good grip on these.”

Pansy rolled her eyes.

“How short do you want it?” She asked, pulling one of the braids out in front of her.

“As short as Rognvaldr’s. Long enough to braid, if you can.”

Pansy grumbled as she measured the hair and set to sawing. She tried to saw towards herself to keep from slashing into her friend’s neck once the hair was cut through, but she also didn’t want to slash her own face by sawing the other way. Resigned to the poor situation, Pansy mumbled something rude and set back to sawing.

“What do you want me to do with this?” She asked when she held a clump in her hands, now detached from Hermione’s head.

“You can toss that one into my tent. The rest I’ll have to figure out how to fashion into a beard.”

“Why did you throw that last bit into the stream then?”

Hermione smirked. “I needed them out of the water so I could get the scarf without anybody seeing me.”

“I saw you.”

Hermione looked up. “You don’t count.

“I am so glad you don’t count me as a person. Next time you tell me to seduce a man, I’d like to formally deny your request.”

“You were already looking for a husband,” Hermione argued. She knew that Pansy had her eyes set for a new husband amongst the travelling raiders, for any overly confident man who would woo her with pretty words, marry her in earnest and get himself killed across the seas. She’d done it once already a few years ago and when Hermione had a dream of a particular man and what he had in his possession when he would die... Pansy was compensated quite nicely after his death with a chest of his finest belongings and a sack of gold that bought her a chance to live on the other side of the stream from Hermione.

“Yeah, but you chose Blaise. I wouldn’t have gone for him if your dreams hadn’t told you about him. And while I’m still grateful for Freyja’s assistance, I still don’t know how that was all to prepare you for the Iceman like you seem to think.”

Pansy finished sawing the hair and smoothed it gently. Hermione mumbled a small word of thanks before tapering off the braids from their frayed edges and collecting the last bits of braided hair from the ground beside her and stuffing them in her deep pocket.

Looking back to Pansy, Hermione tried to stifle the grin that started to spread on her face.

“I-”

“Needed something. I know.” Pansy interrupted.

Hermione nodded. “He had it. Or rather, he would come to have it.”

“And you still won’t tell me what you took from the chest his brothers brought back from across the sea.”

“I’m keeping you safe, Pans...” Hermione whispered to her friend. 

Pansy crossed her arms. “I’d be more helpful if you stopped thinking of me like I’m some kind of fragile red iron about to bend to any hammer. I may not be gifted with the sight, but I’m smart.”

Pansy leaned back as Hermione felt her newly shortened braids.

“At the very least,” Pansy continued. “Tell me what the Iceman is supposed to do?”

Hermione took a shuddered breath and looked to her hands.

“He’s meant to die across the shores. I’m meant to save him.” She responded plainly, as if she were telling Pansy about seeing sheep on a farm.

“You’ve never changed the future before,” Pansy said quietly, in awe. 

“I’ve never cared enough to try.”

Pansy lifted herself to her forearms and looked at Hermione.

“What do you mean by ‘meant to save him?’ Are the Gods asking you to?”

Hermione shrugged. “I’m not sure. But something about him… He’s special.”

“I wonder about you sometimes,” Pansy whispered and raised her hand to brush the hair from Hermione’s face. She tucked it behind her ear and grazed her fingers across the cold skin of Hermione’s cheek. “Angering Odin or the Norns… It’s not something you can come back from. You worry me.”

Hermione pulled Pansy close to her and led her into comfortably laying next to her, head on her shoulder and firmly nestled into Hermione’s arms.

“You don’t need to be afraid for me,” she whispered into the girl’s ear as she smoothed her hair over it. She closed her eyes and twisted Pansy’s braid in her fingers with one hand while, with the other, she reached behind her to grab the damp scarf. With a deft toss, she threw the scarf into her tent and met the motion with a fluid shift to holding Pansy close with both arms.

“I’m not sure if I’m afraid for you or if I’m afraid of you, Hermione.” She gulped and held Hermione tightly to her, changing the subject. “So you’re leaving for sure then? With the raiders?”

Hermione nodded into Pansy’s hair. “I have to save him.”

Pansy sniffed back a tear that, should Hermione ever see, she was absolutely sure she’d never be able to live down considering her bold proclamation of not being fragile hot iron. But her father always told her that hot iron was red with fury and hammered to a point. So what if she bent? So what if she let herself be molded by the girl beside her and the Gods above them? She would wind up strong and fearsome, to be sure. Deadly, too, if she willed herself to become a sword.

 

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ 

Hermione pulled her shawl closer to her and sat back against the wooden stump while a few butchers herded together a large group of sheep, cattle and fowl to be slaughtered, smoked, and dried for the long journey to come. She could smell the smokehouse at all hours of the day, wafting stronger and stronger; sometimes unbearably so. 

Harry grunted and Hermione turned behind her to see him hauling a large wagon full of weaponry.

They liked for him to be in charge of the metals when the raids were being prepared for. His lightning scar somehow meant that he was Thor’s son and the fact that he was found without parents or any name? He was instantly hailed as a celebrity amongst them, passed around from village to village and celebrated by the king, who named him after their word for ‘hearing’ as a sign that they were listening to the Gods and heard their words, accepting their gifts and understanding the responsibility bestowed upon them. Rumour had it he’d ascend the throne one day, but for now, Harry worked with the blacksmith. He was raised with a hammer in hand, guaranteed to bring success in war and honour and glory to Kalteldur. Every blade he hammered, every spear and every weapon he had a hand in forging was said to bring good luck in war to whoever wielded it, regardless of who they were and their ability to fight.

“Hey, Hermione,” he called out when he saw her. Hermione rolled her eyes and smiled at how he could even manage to recognize her through his failing eyes. That was another reason for his name: his failing eyes were said to be a side effect of his heightened hearing. It was whispered that he could hear Thor speaking from up in Asgard. 

But Harry didn’t look happy as he trudged toward her.

“To what do I owe the pleasure of this meeting, then?” He asked, holding out the ripped scarf he’d wrapped around his hand.

“Do you believe me now?” She asked, leaning back. A group of children squealed and ran past them in an attempt to capture a loose chicken and Hermione winced at the noise.

Harry blew some hair out of his face and grimaced.

“I never said I didn’t believe you, ‘Mione, I just-”

“You just didn’t want me to be right, is that correct?”

Harry’s shoulders dropped.

“It’s just —it’s dangerous. You’d be killed if you were found out, and it’s kind of difficult to hide you on a boat for six weeks.”

“Not if I’m hiding in plain sight, right Harry?” She pulled her hood back a bit to show him her shortened hair and he dipped his head down into his hands and groaned.

“You’re going to be the death of me. Seriously, they’re going to kill you and even if you make it across the shores, I’m going to die trying to keep you alive. What’s so important that it’s worth risking both of our lives? All of our lives? Ægir might just kill all of us if he knows a vǫlur stepped into his sea and-”

“He won’t know I’m there in the first place if we do this right.”

“But that doesn’t answer why this is so important. Yes, you foresaw the girl’s death. Yes, you told me you’d have the scarf for me as proof. And yes, I believe that you’ve been sent messages from Odin and whoever else that you need me to get you across the shores. But why are you doing all of this in the first place? What’s so important that you’re willing to kill all of us and all of the visiting raiders? Those men are fathers. Husbands. Sons. Some of them are hardly boys, did you know that? Some don’t even have hair on their chin yet.”

Hermione stared at her feet and contemplated what direction she ought to speak in.

She knew she could convince him if she were to lie to him. He trusted her, believed the best in people.

But she found that she didn’t want to lie to him. He was her oldest friend and aside from Pansy, he was the only one who knew that she was a seer.

“There’s someone I need to save. I don’t know who he is, only that I’ll meet him soon, and that he’ll die across the shores if I don’t stop it.”

Harry rubbed his beard with one hand while the other traced the woven pattern on the scarf.

“You’re sure the Gods want him alive?”

Hermione didn’t want to lie to him, no. But she also knew that confessing to not knowing the Gods’ Will would get her nowhere.

So Hermione nodded. “He is not ready for Valhalla yet. That’s why I need to go.”

Harry absently shook his head. “What do you really need me for then? You seem confident enough that you could hop on one of the ships and go unnoticed the entire time.”

“You are correct,” she offered a small smile. “Always the observant one, even growing up. It never mattered that you could hardly see, you were always the most perceptive one of the bunch.”

Harry snorted. “Just tell me what you need, ‘Mione, and I’ll do my best to help you.”

“I have something that I need you to fix.”

“And what, pray tell, is that?”

Hermione shifted where she sat and pulled her satchel from behind her waist and held it out to him. He took it gingerly and slung it around his shoulder before peeking inside.

His face turned white.

“By Odin, what is this?” He whispered as he peered into the satchel.

Hermione scooted closer to him to tie the strings together, closing the bag and returning Harry’s attention to her.

“It’s a dagger from across the shores. It’s-”

“How did you get it?” He asked, his eyes wide, trying to make sense of the image that was all too clear to him—the closest he’d ever come to perfect vision, he was beyond it. He doubted anybody else had ever seen something so clearly.

“The man Pansy married a few raids back… he stole it from someone before he died.”

Harry blinked in understanding. “And when he died all of his treasures were brought back for his new wife…”

Hermione nodded.

“It’s broken, though. The tip is too dull to make any clean slices, I need it as sharp as it can get. And I need Thor’s blessing in battle…”

Harry dropped his head back, exasperated.

“Not you too. You know I’ve never heard Thor speak to me before—”

“But the men wielding your axes and hammers fare better than those without, and I don’t care whether you speak to Thor or not—I need every advantage I can get.

“So,” she continued, staring at Harry though his eyes could not focus on her own. “Will you help me?”

Harry stood then, and brushed off the dirt and bits of plant that clung to his tunic.

Without speaking, he nodded and turned from his friend and while he left, he couldn’t quite quell the fear that nipped at his ankles and the chilling nausea that coiled inside him.

Hermione watched him walk away and shuddered despite the melting cold. The frost hardly bit anymore and Hermione sighed a breath of relief as Harry tucked the satchel under his tunic and fiddled with it until it looked as if nothing sat under his clothing.

She never worried about these things anymore.

For a long while, she felt so nervous to approach people, too scared to peep a word of request. But she learned that Freyja’s visions were meant to help her, to guide her. She knew what to say. She knew what to do, how to act, how to persuade. It was Freyja that told her to hold Pansy tight in the dark, in the cold, and in return, she was given loyalty beyond what she could ever expect. It was Freyja that told her to befriend Thor’s son, and to teach him how to misinterpret the God’s words as the wind, or distant thunder.

She would never have done any of it without being told to do it; she didn’t like manipulation or lying. But her mentor asked her to—told her to—and Hermione felt a thrill of excitement that she’d been chosen to hear the will of the mighty Freyja. She felt honoured, she felt powerful, glorious, because she had been given the chance to save people and to protect.

The girl in the river didn’t matter, Hermione couldn’t have saved her.

But she could still save the Iceman, and that was enough for her to damn the rest of the raiders in her village. 

Freyja sent her the Iceman for a reason, for the greater good, and Hermione would not fail.

 

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ 

Hermione opened her eyes and found herself standing in the middle of a dense forest. There were pines in every direction, she could feel them brush up against her where she stood.

But she was not inside herself, she realized. If she really tried, she could feel her world under her back, under her fingertips, as if she were lying down despite sitting inside the mind of a large bird. It turned around at the sound of distant movement, and Hermione realized from the thick fog rolling across the forest floor that she was dreaming, as if being inside a raven didn’t always mean such a thing. Usually it was like she were a bird atop a branch, or flying overhead. That’s how she saw the girl die. It’s how she knew what to say to Harry. She’d been a raven nearby, hiding in the fog and watching. Sometimes she saw herself while she was inside the raven. Sometimes she didn’t. Sometimes, even, she was inside her own body, though that was rare and made it relatively difficult to distinguish between dream and reality.

Hermione frowned as the raven spread its wings and flew to the top branch of a nearby pine. She loved the feel of flying, but the darkness was disorienting. Then the raven landed and sat perched on a tall branch. She couldn’t see a thing yet, not even as the bird’s ears focused on the sound of slow steps moving towards them. But they were high up, and Hermione had long since learned how to slow her heart at the sounds of potential danger while inside the bird; she knew she was in no danger in the dreams, and that helped her listen carefully, watch carefully. She needed to remember everything so she could piece it all together when she woke. She needed to have a plan, a strategy she could use to keep from running headfirst into the thick of it.

Hermione’s ears fell into sync with the raven’s and zeroed in on the noises as the bird moved its head to stare at the sky.

Ah, Hermione thought. Finally. Freyja would not have put her inside the raven in the dark with no context. The dreams would be no use if they could not be used to foreshadow or to inform. There had to be a reason for the night, for the sky, for the stars who hung in the sky. There was a curiously bright one to be seen from where the bird had perched itself, and Hermione found herself fascinated by it. It radiated something that vibrated through her and she felt… she felt almost entranced by the feel of it...

And then the wind blew and the trees parted enough to let the light of the moon and stars shine into what appeared to be a clearing. Except now the space where she had woken up in the bird was being taken up by her body, who stood in loose clothing and stared towards the newly breaking light.

And then Hermione heard the steps again.They were slow and heavy and she could feel herself prickle up in the branches as she watched a stranger—a large man covered in white ice—as he slowly stalked behind her body.

She wanted to crow, to make any noise, any sound at all to alert her body of the man behind her, but as he moved into the light she saw his face, and she saw an axe in his hand as he moved close to her body and Hermione realized that her body already knew of his approach.

And then she looked back towards herself and shuddered when she found her own eyes staring back at her, a small smile on her lips.

 

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

“Watch your footing,” Harry commented as Hermione lunged with a dagger he’d given her. It was about the same length as the one Harry was fixing for her.

But she was a quick learner, she always had been. She was agile and had a knack for picking up the defensive arts. 

“Try again,” he suggested as he held an arm out.

Hermione nodded and stretched out. 

She hadn’t even needed to ask him to teach her when he’d approached her and tossed the replacement dagger at her feet. And from what she was witnessing right now, Harry was quite the adept teacher. He had an understanding of the way movement seemed to work; he could quickly process the intricacies of the moment and use them to his advantage. Hermione was impressed by this, she was impressed by his whole demeanor since he demanded that she follow him up the river to a clearing just near the rushing water.

Most of all, she felt immense gratitude to Freyja that she had kept Harry in Kalteldur. Had he learned of his parentage, Hermione was sure that Harry would be anywhere but here in this moment to teach Hermione of all people how to fight.

“We’ve already learned that you’ve got incredible foresight,” Harry said clearly, and Hermione fought a cheeky smile. “And that’s an incredible advantage. But it’s not your greatest advantage.”

Hermione frowned, as she was quite certain that Freyja’s gift of the sight, even if only experienced seconds in advance, set her far ahead. 

“But if I know what my opponent will do next, how is that not my greatest asset?”

“Knowing what they’ll do and knowing what you’ll do about it is entirely different. You could see them lift their sword to cut you in half and still get cut in half if you don’t know how you can react.”

Harry stood in front of her and raised a large stick over her head, as if he were moving in slow motion.

“Now, you’ve seen this coming. You know I’m going to cut you in half. Now you have two choices. You can either jump away out of the sword’s path, or you can get close and take me out.”

Harry still brought the stick down slowly, and took one of his hands off to direct her under his elbows. “Right there is a vulnerable area. Drive your dagger anywhere that armour doesn’t cover and you’ll be dealing with a weakened target.”

Hermione crouched under his arms and stepped back to stand before him as he resumed his normal speed.

“By the time his sword’s where you were standing, he’s already bleeding out,” Harry spoke to her and she could see the fog escaping his lips in the cold morning air. “Your biggest strength is your size. You’re small, and that makes you quick. You need to be ready to use that agility to propel yourself wherever you need to go.”

“But my dagger is shorter than everybody else’s weapons—”

“So you’ll have to get close to them,” he continued. “They’ll want to keep you at a certain distance—it’s harder for them to get the arm power to cut you in half when they’d only hit you with wooden hilts if they tried. So depending on the weapon, you might be better off staying far out of its path...”

“Staying far away from anybody in battle seems a bit impossible, doesn’t it?”

Harry grimaced. “Yes, so in that case, keep low to the ground. You can do incredible damage by slicing the backs of their legs.”

Harry turned to her to bare the back of his legs to his friend and pointed to the soft pale skin. Hermione knelt down to touch the large blue line. 

“Cut on the vein?” She asked.

Harry nodded. “Slice them there and they won’t be able to run. Won’t be able to stand up either, and if the cut is deep enough, they’ll bleed out on the ground. But that would take too long, and I can guarantee you don’t want a grounded body flailing an axe or a sword in every direction. That’s a sure way to get your own people injured.”

Hermione nodded and took a step back from Harry.

One of the rowan trees nearby bristled in the wind and Hermione took a slow step toward it. 

“On a battlefield you won’t be able to stalk. You’re not a wolf, ‘Mione. There’s no use in creeping.”

Hermione stood up, stretched her limbs, and fiddled with the dagger in her hand.

She took a deep breath and then pushed off on her heels. She ran toward the tree, strong and sure-footed, she leapt over a cluster of tree roots and when one of the tree’s branches neared her face she dropped down and sliced at the thick bark.

She laughed from the ground as the tree’s bark and dirt dusted her clothes and billowed around her in a small cloud. 

And then Harry was beside her and feeling his fingers against the low bark of the tree where Hermione had sliced. 

And then she heard him sigh. 

“The purpose of practicing with trees is that you learn how strong you need to be to make a fatal cut. If you’d done what you did here to a man’s bare leg, you’d have drawn blood and caused pain, but not enough for him to drop and be incapacitated.”

Hermione frowned. “Bare leg?”

Harry shook his head. “In battle, you’ll typically see people guarding their vulnerable spots. The backs of their legs, the tender flesh of their arms. Their torso will definitely be covered. You need to learn how to either find the cracks between the leather and slice there, or lead them into territory where you have the advantage. The good news is that some of the most vulnerable places for us are places we can’t actually cover. The back of our knees, for example, are difficult to guard, because we need them free so we can move. Same with the armpit area and elbows. Aim for these areas and you’ll be a formidable opponent.”

Hermione nodded and blew some of the shorter hair from her face before holding up the knife again and closing her eyes.

She envisioned the rowan tree before her transforming into a tall warrior wielding a thick-hilted axe. 

He was strong, but she knew what he was going to do. She knew how he would swing, what direction he would swing in and the speed of it all.

Hermione dove into her own body for a moment to feel her every limb. She felt her nerves, her skin, her muscles and knew what she was capable of. Freyja may have given her the sight, but even a blind man could fight. 

Hermione opened her eyes and the trunk-warrior was right before her and started to lower his axe down. 

And then she dove down towards the trunk and heard the bark split apart around her knife and she smiled, because perhaps Harry was right about her greatest asset being something she and she alone could cultivate.

 

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

 

There was a whispering in the rain that fell down upon Kalteldur in the week since Hermione had woken up in the raven and seen the Iceman.

It spoke something quiet, something anxious, and Hermione felt it building up inside her. It felt almost like she had something under her skin and she scratched at first to free it but it wouldn’t show itself, not even when blood was drawn. It nagged at her for her attention and it took everything she had to quiet the fluttering in her chest because that just couldn’t be healthy, it felt too fast to be healthy…

She wondered if it were possible that she wasn’t healthy at all… if she’d actually angered Odin and the Norns by choosing to save the Iceman.

Since her dream, the storms had droned on and on and Hermione shivered as the water soaked into her clothes and rushed through the encampments all around Kalteldur. Her skin was damp and chilled and sometimes it looked almost grey, and Hermione shook as the cold ripped through her. She feared her teeth might shatter at the strength of it all, so she kept her mouth shut as tight as she could manage so she wouldn’t wake the children.

Since the storms, she’d been sleeping in the Longhouse overnight along with many of the other villagers. Usually the Chieftain didn’t like to open it up to the public, but after the torrential downpours on the second night, a man slipped and broke his neck so badly that bone poked through. Not just any man, either. He was the bow of one of their ships meant to raid and that ultimately appeared to be too much of an inconvenience to let fester and continue. Harry had rolled his eyes when he heard about the dead bowsmen and looked toward Hermione with annoyance in his eyes. She’d simply shrugged back to him.

He was angry, frustrated, but he didn’t want to be on the bad side of any of the Gods.

Hermione wrapped her arms around her knees and held herself close. She knelt her chin onto a bundle of clothing she hugged to her, and from where Hermione had wormed her sleeping space into, she could hear the rain clearly.

And that’s where she sat for hours. Even when her blood came and rocked through her, she sat still and quiet; so quiet that she might have looked like a redwood carving being soaked, dribbling out bits of the rusty insides every once in a while. She tried to sleep, she really did, but the whispering persisted and Hermione found that she couldn’t quite place the voice and this drove her nearly mad. She needed to hear, she needed to understand, but the veil separating her from Asgard and the Gods was too thick while she was awake. She needed to be sleeping to hear it, to dream the voice into something she could make any sense of.

It wasn’t human, not by a longshot. It spoke in words she couldn’t understand; in the rustling of wind through trees and the crashing of waves. In the pattering of the goats hooves outside… it was precisely the kind of voice she’d taught Harry not to hear, and now it was precisely the voice she couldn’t entirely make out.

So she sat, transfixed, with closed eyes and her back up against the wooden walls, hoping to hear Freyja’s voice, hoping to hear her real words.

 

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ 

 

She was inside a bird, she was flying, and she was higher than she’d ever been before.

The air tasted sweeter up in the clouds, it tasted newer. Like it had never been in any other lungs before... Like it had just rolled out of Tyr’s mouth…

Hermione heard a small struggling sound against Tyr’s winds and the raven let its eyes wander to allow her a glimpse of the baby mouse struggling against the its talons.

It was small and Hermione wondered at it as it squeaked and whined and then Hermione saw that it’s eyes were still closed...

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ 

Hermione woke with start, panic pulling her chest fully from her furs.

She took in big gulps of air as her pulse worked to regulate itself. Around her were the sounds of sleeping families and accumulating raiders washed out of their encampments. 

A mother sighed on the other end of the structure at her waking child and frowned to Hermione, who could only see her faintly across the dwindling orange glow of the dying embers.

From where Hermione laid herself down, near the edges of the building, she was straight up against the wooden walls. The cold still creeped through the places where the mud hardened and fell off in chunks, and she could see the hairs on her arms standing. But despite the cold, Hermione was wiping sweat from her face and breathing deeply, as if she were sitting next to a roaring fire.

She blinked in the darkness as the images of her dreams faded and fell from her eyelids.

She was okay. She was fine, she told herself. Her heart started to slow back to a comfortable pace and she could feel her eyelids as they fluttered.

But she was still burning up, so she pushed her fur aside and quietly made her way to the mouth of the long building.

She had to step over people in the process, crawl over sleeping children and families and the sickbeds of the nearly-dead. But the cool breeze was worth it. She could feel the sweat on her face chill on her skin and she shivered. She took another step across the dirt floor and winced when her foot connected with the hand of an older man. He woke quickly with a hiss and mumbled angrily as he turned from her and scooted closer to his wife.

A few people rustled from where they slept behind her, but Hermione’s tenseness fell away as she felt the chiling air brush up against her skin.

The breeze was comforting, so she took a step out into it. 

Her foot crossed the threshold of the longhouse and met a light dusting of snow.

Hermione frowned. It was far too late in the year for snow to be expected; the past week’s rains had drowned out any hint of winter returning and the soggy ground seeped instead of freezing. It kept Hermione from practicing with Harry who, from what she could tell from his ready encouragements, was impressed with her improvements.

But there was snow on her arms as she held out her shaking hands and she smiled at the freshness of it all.

And in Hermione’s boiling blood and on her freezing skin, she knew in all of her that it was time to meet the Iceman. It was the right night. 

She blinked and a dark shadow flapped loudly before the stars. 

She looked up to the skies and locked in on the stars and their placements and the moon and where they all lived next to each other. 

It was almost perfect, it was almost identical to what she’d seen when she was in the dream from before…

Someone coughed behind her, and Hermione shook her head of the dream she’d had of the baby mouse.

She put one foot in front of the other and though her shoes were loose and still soggy from the earlier rains, she walked out into the darkness and followed the sounds of wind blowing through trees, of the river, of the snow as it fell and accumulated on groaning branches.

And Hermione kept walking, kept her feet moving even after they started to burn again from the cold.

She could hardly see where she was going except for what the moon and stars could show her. It was the pale heat of the stars that kept her walking, the position of them not quite right yet. The points had to be in a precise position, at a precise angle. 

She moved under branches and over logs, around large rocks and she leapt over puddles of soggy earth.

And after over an hour of trudging through the thickets and the trees and the brambles, with mud up her shins to her knees and blood crusting her fingernails from the rocks and dried to her forehead where she’d wiped sweat, Hermione found herself standing in a dark clearing. 

She couldn’t see that she was inside it at first, it was much too dark. She could only hear an absence of swaying fir at first and then she found she could breathe clearer air. The damp dust and snow didn’t swirl in the air as much when it didn’t have the trees to fall from.

She realized that she stood in the middle of the clearing when a gust of wind pushed the trees out of the way for the starlight to shine through and briefly illuminate where she stood.

She looked up, craned her neck, and felt a warm pull in her chest, as if the very fabric that she’d been sewn by was being lit on fire. 

The stars were finally in the right places. She smiled then, and looked up toward a branch that bobbed just slightly.

A large raven stared at her through the mist rising off the ground and Hermione could hear the slow sounds of movement behind her. It was almost imperceptible and it was slow, so slow. It nearly tormented her, it was so slow. But it was steady and it was deliberate, and Hermione had seen this all before.

She could feel the figure’s warmth as he moved toward her and as she exhaled, she stared pointedly into the raven’s eyes and smiled.

 

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ 

 

Draco awoke to the sound of brambles being pushed and waded through. He thought it odd, at first, because he couldn’t imagine why anybody in his group would be awake at this time and stumbling around making so much noise. Sure, Theo and Alti had been drinking—just as Draco had been—but each of them were chosen by their village, Höggormur, with care. None of them would risk fumbling in an unfamiliar region, especially when other clans were sure to be camping out on their journey to the coast.

Draco‘s eyes snapped open.

Other clans. 

Grabbing an axe from next to the dead fire, Draco silently heaved his body from the fur he’d laid out and listened carefully.

The trudging noise was consistent and confused. It kept moving steadily but Draco could tell that whoever was moving was either very lost or very clever. He thought of wolf packs and wondered if there was a chance that they’d been followed through the forest on their way through it. If another clan had seen them and recognized them as enemies, it would be smart to lure them out.

“Vargdropi,” he whispered, cursing himself for having laughed loudly around a fire with his friends.

Draco stood nimbly and listened carefully, identifying the quiet sound and starting toward it.

It was not difficult, nor did it take much time at all to get into a rhythm of following the graceless figure. He could tell that whoever it was, they were small. The distance between cracking twigs and laboured grunts were far too short to be someone of Draco’s height. 

And then the cracking stopped, and the wind picked up and a light filtered through the trees.

Not far from him, not far at all, was a small clearing. It wasn’t well lit at all, he could only see the faint bobbing of light against a figure who, upon first glance, looked as if they were staring upwards.

Draco took a step toward the clearing and there was a noise from up in the trees of a bird shifting its weight on one of the branches. From where Draco stood, he could almost just make out the creature.

And then the wind blew again, harder this time, and light splashed against the shape of a woman.

Draco had to keep from coughing in surprise.

He recognized her… 

It was a vague recognition, really barely there except for a small itching in the balls of his feet that told him he knew exactly what stood before him.

Feeling his axe firmly between his fingers, Draco crouched and tucked under a low hanging branch.

He didn’t really bother with being quiet anymore; fylgjur weren’t the kind of spirits anybody could hide from. They appeared to bring the future to their charge and each time Draco had seen the fleeting figure of the woman with long wiry hair before him, bad luck befell him shortly after. He’d seen her in her many forms and none were favourable; he dreaded her and her futures and he desperately wanted to kill her before she could bring bad luck to him again. 

He thought of Astoria back home in Höggormur and the baby she was pregnant with. He thought of the child and how he’d been hoping for a boy. He already knew what he would name it… 

The figure shifted slightly in the light, or perhaps the light shifted slightly on her.

He took a slow step toward her, wary of spooking the spirit into fleeing before he could catch her. If she didn’t turn around, then perhaps he could get close enough to surprise her. Maybe he could kill her if he was lucky, or at least trap her and force her into her animal form and bargain for his future… for his son’s future... 

And then he was in the clearing, and she still stood with her back to him.

He moved toward her slowly, carefully, as if she were a deer and he was her hunter. Draco could almost laugh at the luck of it all; the demon spirit haunting him since birth… here before him and letting him approach her. 

And then he was behind her, and she tilted her head back and let out a deep breath. 

Draco remained still for a moment and let her adjust to having him behind her. He wanted the benefit of surprise for when he acted, and after a few minutes of standing still, he slowly raised his axe. He was careful not to make any noise lest she vanish into the mist.

Draco closed his eyes and took a deep breath.

And he swung hard and fast with the blade, expecting it to slice through the fleshy body and leak out feathers or sawdust.

But the blade sliced through nothing at all and the fylgja popped up beside him.

He swung again, but she was far too close to hack at. He grunted and tried to lunge with the hilt of it, but she was too quick.

“Please,” she pleaded, and Draco dropped his axe at the sound. He’d never known fylgjur to be able to speak… all the songs and stories said they were mute creatures…

He pushed her away from him and held her still in the light.

Draco closed his eyes and steadied his breathing. He’d nearly just killed an innocent person, a girl looking just the same age as him and his own wife and as he looked at her he found small differences between her and his fylgja.

Her hair was much shorter than his spirit-creature’s, and her eyes were much more human. They almost didn’t look birdlike at all, except for the darkness of them.

“Who are you?” He asked, and it took a while for his face to really make sense to Hermione. She’d seen it so few times, but thought of it so frequently that it seemed distorted after years of warping him in her mind. But she was awestruck because he was more beautiful than she’d remembered, than she’d made him out to be.

“Who are you?” He asked again, and Hermione blinked.

“Don’t you recognize me?” She asked, her eyebrows knit together.

“Should I?”

“I’m not - I’m from Kalteldur,” she stuttered breathlessly.

He was striking. Tall, with white blonde hair, white as snow, white as ice. But it was his pale grey eyes that drove her back into her mind’s eye, drove her back into the images of the Iceman she could remember from her dream so long ago.

Grey eyes… She lifted her hand to wave it in front of him, to really make sure that he could see her, and he swatted her hand away.

“I’m not blind, vagr,” he said sternly, internally wincing at the sharpness of his voice.

“Good,” she smiled as she pushed past his hand away. “I want you to see me.”

She stared at his hair and smiled.

He wasn’t covered in snow like she first thought when she saw him.

He was wearing it. He was born with it.

She took a step towards him, gingerly holding a hand up to touch the chest that was now so close… so near to her that a single step more would draw them together…

“Why are you out at this time?” Draco asked, stepping back as her hand pushed against him.

Hermione smiled and twisted her tongue in her mouth and craned her neck around to see the raven’s branch barren.

“I was lost,” she said as she turned to face him again. “But perhaps I wasn’t…”

Draco peered through the dimly lit darkness at her hair swaying in the wind, and then back at her face as it neared his. 

“What—” he began, only to be met by firm hands pulling his face down. 

He felt a swell of panic when she kissed him. 

At first, his brain told him to fight her off; the woman in front of her was not Astoria, and as such, he had no business kissing her.

But then the warmth of her, or the lack thereof, triggered something in his brain. He’d not put on his warmer over-clothes when he stood to track her. It was a simple choice of stealth-over-comfort, but he regretted it as he felt her cold fingers pulling at his cooling skin. 

She was so cold, she felt almost as if she were made of ice. 

Draco thought back to his wife, and peered through the chill at the strange creature in front of him. 

“What are you really doing out tonight?” He asked, putting more force into his voice to keep it from wavering. 

Hermione smiled, he could barely just see it. 

“Does it matter?” She asked, leaning in to ghost her lips over his. 

He snorted. “Why wouldn’t it?

“Because,” she started, “I’m here now. And so are you.” She leaned in again, and Draco found his back firmly against a thick tree.

“This can either be a wonderful coincidence,” she ran her hands down the front of his tunic and grazed her fingers against the tender skin of his waist. “Or the will of the Gods.”

He didn’t realize his arms were lifting and that his shirt were no longer there until a small dusting of snow shook free from the branches overhead. 

“And if it’s the will of the Gods, then who are we to really stand in their way?”

She placed her hand flush against his bare chest and he hissed at the sudden pain, the immediate chill, of her cold skin against his own. 

Draco shut his eyes tightly and tried to focus on the image of Astoria leaning in to kiss him, but he couldn’t think of any. 

He couldn’t picture his own wife trying to kiss him… 

Draco opened his eyes at Hermione in front of him, dim and obscured by shadows and darkness and he let his head fall back against the tree trunk. Sure, she wasn’t his fylgja. She wasn’t his raven of doom or the demon that broke his arm, killed his parents, led Astoria to cheating on him, lost his favourite carving knife, got him lost in the forests, made him go hungry in the storms. 

He thought back to the raven he’d seen just a few days back, and how it eyed him venomously.

Draco shivered and gripped Hermione tightly. She gasped at the sharpness of it, but held herself flush against him.

If he was going to die on his travels, if he was going to be met by a wayward future, he wouldn’t let the touch of a woman go unfelt.

She stepped back down onto the balls of her feet, rolling from her toes. She looked up at him inquisitively, watching his face as the muted light of the distant setting moon started to dim the darkness of the night around them. 

“So which is it?” she murmured quietly before leaning back in to rub her face against the stubble of his chin. “A coincidence or the will of Asgard?”

“Does it matter?”

She smiled and moved her hands down to lift the hems of her tunic. 

“No,” she hummed against him as she leaned in and kissed him again.

 

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ 

 

Draco opened his eyes and winced at the light. He wasn’t sure when he’d fallen asleep, or what time it even might be now.

He could hear Theo and Atli’s voices in the distance as they called for him, but he couldn’t quite remember why they would be looking for him. Draco sat up and his tunic fell from his chest as if it had been draped over him like a blanket. He shivered as his body registered the unexpected chill and groaned as he moved.

His body felt sore and raw. He rubbed a calloused hand across his chest and yawned while looking about the clearing he seemed to be in. 

It took a moment for everything to fall into place; the exhaustion he felt despite just waking up, and the wiry bits of dark brown hair that stood out like a sore thumb against his white skin and white hair. The trail of fingernail marks down his arms and the strange and startling deep red of dried blood across his arms, down his torso and, as he suspected, all over his legs.

Widening his eyes a bit, he pushed his hand down between his legs and tried not to gasp at the cold.

Dropping his head back, Draco groaned loudly and pushed himself up. 

A duet of laughter peeled from just out of the clearing. 

“What did you do, rip open a rabbit and fuck it in your sleep?” Theo snickered while Atli knelt over to pick up a handful of snow and tossing it toward Draco.

“You better wash up,” Atli tried to keep his face straight. “You don’t want to be known as a rabbit-fucker when we get to the village.”

“I didn’t fuck a rabbit,” Draco protested, catching the snow and pressing it to his body. He hissed again at the temperature, but rubbed it against himself. Slowly, the dried blood started to wash off and soon enough, the snow beneath Draco’s feet was littered with tinted red water.

“Then you better have some kind of excuse, mate. Because this,” Atli gestured to dried blood, “this looks like a bad omen.”

Draco scoffed and fiddled with new clumps of snow against his narrow torso. But neither of the boys in front of him responded, and Draco looked up. They stood tall and confidently, but Draco knew them well. They’d been together for years, over countless raids and skirmishes and the three of them had killed more people than they could count on all of their fingers. They’d been together long enough that Draco knew that both Theo and Atli held a similar amount of respect for the supernatural influences that he did. 

It was usually the three of them against the omens, against the spirits and the creatures, but Draco had gone off alone and they’d found him naked and covered in blood. 

If it had happened to either of them, Draco would be wondering the same things. 

“This was no omen, friends,” he laughed reassuringly. “This was a gift.”

“Because good luck in war and good health are lousy gifts, right?” Theo smirked and turned his back to head toward their encampment. 

“This gift was worth the blood,” Draco mumbled as he fought to throw his clothes on. 

“Besides,” he continued, “we might only have a half year left of gifts to take. Might as well feel a woman while you can, right?”

“Feel a WOMAN!” Atli hollered, making Theo jump in the distance. “Are you really so bad at sex that a woman would abandon you in the early hours of dawn rather than stick around to fuck you again?”

Draco laughed as Atli clapped him on the back. 

“Did you hear that, Theo?” Atli yelled out. “If the Great Dragon can’t get a woman to stay, that’s surely a bad omen indeed! We ought to tie you down here and leave you, keep your bad luck from spreading to our own cocks.” 

Draco rolled his eyes and pushed Atli forward.

“Why would I have wanted her to stay?” He asked loudly to his friends. “Imagine she were hanging off me and followed us back home. Astoria would take that about as well as she’d take a severed head and stick it up into her womb.”

Atli doubled over in laughter. 

“You’d better hope you die out west then,” Theo called over, getting the attention of the two boys. 

“Why would you say something like that?” Draco asked, offended. He had nearly caught up to the lanky frame of his friend standing still when something dark against the snow caught his eyes.

“Because,” Theo responded, stepping aside to reveal a thin woman with wiry hair and dried blood streaks on her arms and face. “It seems as if your gift might be planning on sticking around a bit longer than you’d thought.”

Atli guffawed 

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ 

Hermione looked to the man beside her and flexed her fingers around the dagger in the satchel. She held it close, just in case anybody were to point her out in the crowd. But Draco shuffled along the ship in front of her and moved her along behind him swiftly, enough so that the Chieftain didn’t recognize her and keep her from boarding. 

The hair on her chin itched and Hermione strained her every will to resist the urge to rub under her nose and along the bottom of her face. 

“You’re helping me now?” Hermione asked under her breath to the Iceman, who still moved in front of her, around her. 

"Why wouldn't I?" He asked quietly.

"You've spent the past week and a half ignoring me. I thought that-"

"And I've now got these two calling me rabbit-fucker every chance they get, thanks to you." He smacked Theo and Atli in the heads as they hopped over seats in front of them. 

"Why are you helping me now?" She asked sternly, annoyed.

“Trust me,” he replied lazily. “Raids are no joke. They’re dangerous, fast, and a lot of people die. I figure, what’s the harm having a madwoman around? At the very least, I get a good shag before raiding. At most? Who knows, maybe you’ll get yourself killed. It’s a win-win situation for me.”

Hermione huffed. “And if I don’t die?”

Draco stopped abruptly to look back at her. “We are going to be on this ship for six weeks, which gives us all an awful lot of time to learn about each other. My guess - or rather, my hope - is that you’ll throw yourself overboard when one of these horny men figure out you’re a girl who’s stowed away.”

“Women are respected warriors-”

“But you’re not. The only person here who respects you as a fighter or as a sailor is that man over there.” Draco pointed to Harry, who was tentatively helping men onto the ships.

“He’s Thor’s son, haven’t you heard? His word is law, nobody can touch me without his permission.”

Draco laughed. “You keep telling yourself that. Six weeks is a long time. I’ve seen men resort to fucking each other in the middle of the ship just to get one off. It’s a good thing Theo and Atli know what you are, else I’ll probably have quite a lot of explaining to do by the time I get home to my wife…”

Hermione pursed her lips and tried to keep quiet, sitting down when Draco reached the furthest part of the ship. He gestured for her to sit somewhere else, but Hermione glared at him as she sat down beside him.

“Listen,” he continued, removing one of his tunics and placing it on his seat. “Thor’s son can vouch for you all he wants, but when it comes down to it, we are humans of the Midgard, and we will act as such. The Gods think that they can control us, but it isn’t true.”

Hermione rolled her eyes. She already knew she would make it across the shores, and she knew that unless she disobeyed Freyja, the man in front of her would die. She could almost smile at the silliness of his words; he had no idea. He was so blind, he couldn’t see a single thing.

“They’ve got more control over our lives than you seem to think, Draco.”

He huffed. “Only because we give them the power.”

“We don’t give them anything.”

Hermione stretched her arms and cracked her back. 

“Alright!” Someone yelled from the front of the ship. “This boat is full!”

There was a loud dislodging noise and a cacophony of raucous jeering as the ship swayed a bit.

Hermione closed her eyes and tried to keep her breathing steady. This is it. 

This is finally it. 

It's finally time. 

Water splashed the back of her head from behind and Hermione turned behind her to see Theo and Atli paddling behind her. They laughed and slapped each others legs at Hermione's scowl, and Hermione wondered how long six weeks would actually feel, and whether or not she had the mental abilities to keep herself grounded and sane.

If she had to judge based off of the laughter behind her and the sharp glares beside her, Hermione was inclined to say no. 

But she could see Harry up at the front of the ship. 

He looked up and their eyes connected, and he smiled. And Hermione smiled. 

She'd make it, and she'd save the fucking asshole beside her. Even if it cost her everything. She'd save him.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ 

Hermione opened her eyes slowly and expected to see the darkness of unending sea-skies above her. But instead of darkness, she awoke to a blinding light, and she had to squint to keep her eyes from watering. 

Fog rolled past her knees and Hermione pursed her lips. 

She was dreaming. 

But as she moved, and she could feel herself move without the raven encasing her, she began to hear the sounds of metal clanging and of voices yelling, screaming, crying. It was quiet, like the sound of everything around her was stuck inside a seashell and she had to lift it to her ear, close her eyes, and focus very carefully… 

It was disorienting at first. She could still feel the ship rocking beneath her but as everything started to fade into view in front of her, she found herself laying down, inside her very own body, on a grassy field. She breathed in deeply and tried to think, but it sent shivers through her as a wave of nausea rocked her. She was accustomed to waking up inside the bird, not herself. But she tested her limbs again, and was distantly aware of the bright light fading away from her and being replaced by the frenzied movement of bodies swarming. 

And the clarity of it all… It blurred into itself in her head but it was so sharp and so clear… 

Her teeth chattered, chilled by something entirely new from the cold she’d been born to endure. It felt different… Like she was being emptied… 

She brought herself to her feet and swayed, shook her head, and blinked, trying to right the world of slipping down around her.

“Hermione, get out of the way!” She heard Harry scream as he plowed into her waist and drove her into the mud. 

She kicked at him, tried to pry herself away, but he held her by her waist and wrestled her to keep her down. 

“Please, ‘Mione, you need to get out!” Harry pleaded, and a bead of blood dripped from her forehead onto his arms. She could see the bright red of it. 

Hermione lifted a shaking hand to her head and found it numb - she could probably be convinced that it wasn’t even there. But her fingers came back covered in thick red blood and her jaw quivered. 

“Get up,” Harry stood and pulled at her arms to lift her, but she found she couldn’t even put solid weight into them. It was almost as if the bones had been removed from her body altogether.

“Hermione!” Harry pulled again and this time she stood on shaking legs, but she stood. 

He gripped her hand tightly and jolted her forward as a sword swiped past her, barely missing her, hardly missing her. But it hadn’t quite missed her, she could feel the blood trickling down her leg and it was numb enough that it didn’t hurt, nothing hurt, but she was starting to get dizzy.

She wavered as she pushed through the heaving bodies.

And then there was a scream, and Hermione stopped running. It was the Icema— it was Draco. It was Draco’s voice that was screaming and Hermione yanked back on Harry’s hand.

He turned to yell at her for stopping but before he could, a sharp arrow thrust itself from inside his chest. 

He hardly made a noise as he dropped to his knees before her and collapsed onto his stomach. Hermione’s face turned whiter, if that was at all possible, and a tremor rocked through her… Somewhere in the distance a man wielding a bow was firing arrows into the air, into the crowd, and Hermione felt that he must not care who he’s hurting, as long as someone falls.

Hermione curled her lip and raised her dagger from her belt. It was hard to get a grip on it, the blood from her head and her leg coated the hilt and she struggled to hold it steady and firm enough to throw it. But she took a deep breath and smiled when it connected with the throat of the madman.

And then her ears heard the scream ending and her eyes tore through the crowds. 

And then she found him, and he stood with his narrow axe in hand as he hurled it into the stomach of a large woman holding a dagger into his leg.

Hermione grunted and lifted herself from the crouch she’d fallen into. The madman hadn’t been far when he was shooting the arrows, and Hermione was surprised to see him still alive as she stood over him. His eyes widened as she bent forward to grab the hilt of it, and blood gushed from his neck as she drove it further still, jaggedly slicing until she could feel the bones in his neck pop and loosen.

He was dead at last, and Hermione yanked the knife from the throat of the madman and turned to stalk toward the woman with her knife still in her Iceman’s leg. But she was dead too, Draco’s axe in her stomach was more than enough to kill her and Hermione could see intestines and organs slipping from the body. 

Her fingers itched and they tightened around the dagger. 

She took a step toward him and winced as the numbness started to subside, leaving her head pounding and leg searing. She could feel the blood falling down her neck, down her back, pooling in her shoes and drying in crusts that she couldn’t quite shake off.

She turned her head briefly to look at Harry, pale and lifeless on the grass, being enveloped by the fog that rolled and she must be dreaming, she remembered, she must not be awake. But it felt so real and so loud and she could feel the pain and it felt all too real, all too alive, to be a dream. 

She looked up from her hands to meet Draco’s eyes, which widened at the sight of her bloodied and limping. He let out a brief string of swears as he tore the dagger from his leg and stood, starting to make his way toward her as a clearing started to form around them. 

A bird screeched, and Hermione’s ears pricked. She turned to look but found that her body was no longer responding to her. It felt just like it did when she was inside the raven… like she couldn’t control herself anymore...

Out of the corner of her eye, a large black creature darted through the air gracefully, flapped its wings soared overhead. 

Hermione’s fingers tightened around the dagger and her muscles tensed, though she tried as hard as she could to loosen her fingers. 

And then they were nearly face to face. He dropped his axe and stooped slightly to bend over her and wrap his arms around her, but she couldn’t control her own limbs.

Her body smiled to him, but in one swift movement, her wrist flicked and then her whole body was lunging, and Hermione hadn’t had any time to register her fingers twitching around the dagger lodged into Draco’s stomach. 

His mouth gaped open as his eyebrows furled in confusion. She dug it deeper into him and pulled up, and inside herself she screamed as Draco’s mouth started to bubble small bits of blood. 

He looked at her with his mouth still open and slid off the dagger and onto the ground. 

Hermione screamed but it didn’t reach her body. 

It was too far away to reach.

She didn’t understand.

She could feel herself turning to walk away, and she felt herself look up to lock eyes with a large black bird as it descended upon the battlefield.

She screamed.

Out of the corner of her eyes she could see the bird hop toward Draco as he laid on the ground. She could see his hand stretch out to it, she could almost hear him try to speak but she screamed again, refusing to listen. She already knew what he was saying. She'd seen it before, and she's replayed it against her eyelids at night for years.

She screamed.

 

But it didn’t reach her body.

 

It was too far away to reach. 

 

 

She screamed. 

 

 

But it didn’t reach her body.


End file.
